Age Appropriateness

MPAA Rating

Caveat Spectator

They can be more
important (Schindler’s
List) or more innovative (Memento), more challenging (Black Hawk Down) or more
rewarding (The Fellowship of
the Ring) — but they don’t come more solidly put
together. For sheer craft — for the ideal marriage of bravura
storytelling, rip-roaring action, dazzling visuals, moody
atmosphere, masterful effects, and evocative social and
philosophical implications — Minority Report is an
achievement of the highest order.

Based on a short story by Philip K. Dick (who also provided
the source material for Blade Runner and Total
Recall), Spielberg’s film combines the virtues of good
science fiction, good film noir or crime fiction, and good
popcorn summer action. It’s simultaneously futuristic and retro;
it’s effects-laden but story-driven; it touches on issues of
moral and social freedom, but doesn’t get all cerebral on the
audience. Those who felt shortchanged by either or both of last
year’s dark-themed sci‑fi offerings from the same
director or star (A.I. Artificial
Intelligence and Vanilla
Sky, respectively) will find themselves more than
repaid.

Set little more than a half-century in the future, Minority
Report takes place in a world in which magnetically powered
cars race along the sides of skyscrapers, ubiquitous retinal
scanning technology is used for everything from subway access to
direct marketing, and data is stored on small clear cards or
projected onto enormous transparent screens.

Most importantly, an experimental law-enforcement project
called "Pre-Crime", headed by hotshot John Anderton
(Tom Cruise) and masterminded by patrician Lamar Burgess (Max von
Sydow), has successfully eliminated murder and virtually all
violent crime in Washington, D.C. for over five years, and is on
the verge of going nationwide.

At the heart of this operation are the
"Pre-Cogs," a trio of strangely gifted individuals
able to glimpse future events hours or days before they occur.
Kept semi-sedated in a nutrient bath, the Pre-Cogs
share collective dreams of future atrocities, their every thought
holographically recorded and carefully analyzed.

The system seems perfect. The Pre-Cogs’
determinations appear impossible to mask or counterfeit, thanks
to one of the film’s loopier conceits — a laser-powered device
that carves the name of the future killer and his intended victim
into custom-crafted billiard-sized wooden balls with a unique
grain pattern that can’t be duplicated, served up via a
Habitrail-like system of plastic tubes.

The examination of the recorded visions is carried with a
punctiliously observation of ritual: There are two witnesses in
remote locations, and a vocal record of the findings is kept as
the examiners ferret out clues to when and where the crimes will
occur. Of course, because "Pre-Crime" is so good at
what they do, the crimes never actually do occur. The images the
Pre-Cogs witness, then, are potential crimes, not
actual ones.

Does this mean people are being arrested and sentenced for
mere intent to commit a crime — intent they might never actually
have followed through on? Anderton argues not: "The
Pre-Cogs don’t see what you intend to do,
only what you will do." Will do, that is, unless
prevented from doing so on the basis of the
Pre-Cogs’ visions.

Still, questions remain. Federal agent Danny Witwer (Colin
Farrell), a skeptic investigating Pre-Crime,
acknowledges that the program has been successful at catching
potential criminals — but how do they know that their
intervention has always been the only factor standing between the
potential criminal and the uncommitted crime? If the future is
written in stone, how can it be averted at all? And if it
isn’t written in stone, mightn’t at least some of those
uncommitted crimes have gone uncommitted even without the
intervention of Pre-Crime — averted by some other,
unforeseen factor?

Anderton refuses to contemplate these questions — until one
day when he has no choice. That day comes when the
Pre-Cogs’ visions unexpectedly show him something he
can’t accept: himself, less than two days in his own future,
killing a man he doesn’t even recognize.

Here the story shifts into murder-mystery mode: Has the
infallible system failed? Or has someone done the impossible and
framed him somehow? Or, even more unthinkably, could he really be
guilty?

Then comes the impossible task of running in a world without
anonymity, hiding in a transparent city, fighting a force with a
perfect track record of winning all its fights. Here Spielberg
proves that, even if the last Indiana Jones movie was over a
dozen years ago, he’s still an action virtuoso. Standout episodes
include a stunt sequence involving jumping from vehicle to
vehicle in gravity-defying traffic, a battle involving jetpacks,
and a combat sequence on an automated assembly-line conveyor
belt.

If those three scene descriptions sound oddly reminiscent of
three parallel sequences in this year’s other big sci-fi movie,
Attack of the Clones, rest
assured Spielberg is doing something very different from what
Lucas did. (The conveyor-belt battle in Report, in
particular, is far more effective than the rather bloated
parallel sequence in Clones, and has a terrific
resolution. This movie’s jetpack combat is also cooler, if only
because there are more guys in more jetpacks and the battle
actually gets airborne. As for the traffic sequence, while
there’s no upstaging the mad charm of Lucas’s aerial car chase
over Coruscant, the more restrained sequence in Report is
equally memorable.)

Spielberg has always known how to manipulate an audience’s
emotions, a knack he makes effective use of here. Humor
alternates with squirming discomfort and emotional release as the
director pokes fun of Cruise’s sex-symbol status in a couple of
funny incidents, then leaves us wincing with a number of scenes
involving eyeballs, or a character fumbling blindly for the one
edible sandwich in a squalid refrigerator. There’s also a
thoroughly enjoyable Fugitive-like chase scene in a mall
that involves some of the more dramatic applications of the
Pre-Cogs’ abilities.

Along the way, Minority Report raises questions about
social freedoms as well as existential or moral freedom.
Washington, D.C. may be a murder-free zone, but it’s also a city
in which talking billboards know your name — and spending habits — and policemen can send creepy arachnoid robot room by room
through a tenement building, optically scanning and identifying
every warm body they find, whether the inhabitants happen to be
sitting on the toilet, having sex, whatever.

Then there’s the matter of the Pre-Cogs themselves. Is it
moral or humane to keep them in a nightmarish stupor of
atrocities for the sake of the rest of society? "It’s better not
to think of them as human," advises a Pre-Crime
technician, a comment with obviously sinister resonances of
slavery, the Holocaust, abortion. And the way
Pre-Crime deals with its interrupted offenders
obviously calls for a revised conception of what is not cruel and
unusual punishment.

As with most time-bending movies, issues of temporal logic
aren’t necessarily worked out with total consistency. (The
Pre-Cogs’ visions seemingly always reveal what
would happen if not for actions that take the vision
itself into account — except for one crucial vision of
events that are precipitated by the vision itself.)

Another plot hole involves one character’s continued optical
access to a facility long after the point when his access should
have been revoked (and without setting off any alarms for the
people who are theoretically waiting for him to show up on some
optical scanner). Despite these flaws, the film proceeds with
such authority that you can’t help believing it as you watch
it.

Spiritual allusions and references appear throughout the film.
A few are explicit and literal: a character making the sign of
the cross before a mission, a dying man kissing a holy medal, an
agent who’s an ex-seminarian. Others are figurative or symbolic:
The protected room in which the Pre-Cogs dream is
called "the temple," and one of the Pre-Crime team
suggests that they’re "more like priests than police officers."
And is all the immersion imagery (the Pre-Cogs in
their nutrient bath; a pair of drowning sequences; a pair of
life-changing moments in which a character is submerged, first in
a swimming pool, then in a bathtub of ice water) meant to be some
kind of baptism motif?

In any case, these religious echoes resonate with the movie’s
theme of fate and free will. Spielberg doesn’t explore this
question in any kind of profound way, but he takes it seriously,
and offers an answer that’s satisfyingly humanistic while
respecting the ground rules established by the movie. It’s a
fitting touch in what will very probably turn out to be far and
away the best escapist entertainment of the summer of 2002.